Christmas Food
Now the main thing to say about Christmas food is, I was so full after dinner on Christmas that swallowing my vitamin pills was an effort.* Peter managed not to overeat, but having a horrible cold was instrumental in this self-restraint and he’s been making up for this insult to the Proper Way of Things since. I’m being helpful. (“Here, darling, wouldn’t you like another piece of pumpkin bread?”)
Christmas dinner was merely an hour and a half late too, which is good going for us, although, like getting the tree up, visitors tend to focus the mind wonderfully about such things, especially when they involve small screaming children who are up past their bedtime-or even medium-sized nonscreaming children who live in better run households and merely hang about looking malnourished and peaky. The hellhounds tried to stand in for these but they keep forgetting not to bounce. And I remembered about Nigella’s sprouts slightly too late, drat it, so I’ll try them for New Year’s or something.**
Now I’ve been worrying about this for two days, and so I offer you: Further Musings on the Evolution of Pumpkin Bread. What got me started was Classics Cat’s pear gingerbread recipe, and her comment about how many pears before the batter got too wet. Yes. And pumpkin puree varies. The stuff I’m using at the moment is very sloppy, and I am in a phase, at the moment, of wanting to be able to toast my pumpkin bread, which means I’m using more flour than if my puree were more gloppy and less runny, and also than if I wanted That Custardy Effect which is divine but it doesn’t toast well. Gods, how does anyone learn to bake? Because it’s all in the eye and hand really. (And the phase, of course. I may have to make Custardy Pumpkin Bread soon. I’ve been thinking about that on account of Silksieve’s pumpkin brownies, looking at that and thinking-with my can’t-follow-a-recipe mind-hmm, I might knock out an egg or two and use more pumpkin-since it’s a flat pan instead of a loaf tin you can get away with more sog.) So anybody out there who knows what she likes in a tea bread batter, hold off on the last half cup of flour (if you take any out, take out some white: the wholemeal gives it a lovely texture) and have a look at my Christmas 2007 Pumpkin Bread batter, and decide whether you want to add it or not.
And then there’s the sherry. That whole scam about ‘cooking wine’ is . . . a scam. You don’t want to put Thunderbird or Cold Duck *** in your bread or your casserole. It won’t be as nasty as drinking the stuff raw but it still won’t be good. You want a sherry (or a port or a Marsala) that you don’t see the homeless drunks downtown drinking, okay? (Or your teenage nephew or his girlfriend.) You want something you’d serve to your mother in law (if she drinks sherry).
And then there’re the spices. Along with my wanting-to-toast-it phase I’m in a pumpkin-prominence phase, where I want the spices just a kind of pleasant background murmur. (Although I want the cinnamon murmuring a little louder than the rest.) If you want pumpkin spice bread, you want to double what I’ve listed.
I also don’t use salt. Salt creeps up on you and I’m determined it should not creep up on me. I know the philosophy about salt as a taste enhancer but I say take care of your taste buds so you don’t need an across-the-board taste enhancer. It’s like putting sugar in everything-who needs it? I’m as pathetic a sugar addict as the next person, but I want it where I put it and I’m damned if I want it in my organic pea soup. † I do cheat to the extent that I usually cook with salted butter-and yes I know about that too but I am just not going to believe that quality brands are masking offness by drowning it in salt. And I go for slightly salted-there are brands I won’t use because they’re too salty. And a little slightly salted butter is enough for most baking-I think. Also in my normal extremist way I’m saving my salt ration for things like steak. I like a kind of crust of salt on slabs of red meat. Therefore it has to come out elsewhere. And most things really don’t need it. Or see what you think.
And before we get entirely off the subject of either pumpkin or recipe copyright (you are reading the footnotes, aren’t you?), I recommend all you other Pumpkin Fiends out there to the Frog Commissary [sic] pumpkin waffles which are glorious, although they are a bit of a faff, especially because let me emphasize that you DO WANT the hot cider syrup too. (I have made the cider syrup for other things. . . . ) But I don’t want to post the recipe here as my Single Sample/Shill from the Frog cookbook, the way I did the Deeply Gooey Brownies from BEAT THIS because I make a lot of stuff out of the Frog.†† Although I don’t make either the waffles or the syrup like the recipe tells you to, but in my mind they’re still the Frog Commissary pumpkin waffles (and hot cider syrup).
Oh for heaven’s sake! With the gingerbread recipe this entry is over five pages long. Don’t we all have a few other things to do with our time? So I’ve just cut the end and I’ll post the gingerbread recipe tomorrow. Really. Yes. Yes! Stop looking at me like that! Things happen!
* The fact that I take about four hundred and twelve supplements of various unswallowability^ may have something to do with this. It’s like a whole extra meal. I take the ones I know do me good because I can feel the difference, the standard ones that everyone is short on, and the ones that people with ME either burn up most rapidly or least efficiently.
^ I get through about a bottle of water during this nightly offensive. So then I’m supplemented and hydrated so it’s All Good Really.
** Does anybody have a good grip on copyright for recipes? This seems to me an extraordinarily murky area. Especially for those of us who never follow what a recipe says anyway. The point(s) to me is she suggests a splash of Marsala (which would also be good in my pumpkin bread, by the way) and creating a thick shiny sauce with the butter in the pan, and throwing a handful of parsley in at the last minute. I love parsley-I think I’ve told you that my houmous is clotted with parsley-and I haven’t done this, but her other suggestions, panacetta and chestnuts, I’ve done for years. Well, I use bacon these days, because you can get organic bacon and you can’t get (that I’ve ever seen) organic panacetta, and yes, I’m pretty much that crazed about eating organic, and yes that does change the recipe^, but that’s my point. Nigella’s recipe was out of the Observer-or possibly the Guardian-a few weeks ago, so it’s probably available on their web site anyway. Or maybe one of her books.
But especially since there seem to be a lot of people who like to eat (!) on this blog, we need a directive about recipe copyright. If anyone knows, please post. Otherwise I’ll try to find someone to ask after the holidays as people come staggering back to their offices and chirpy superfluous queries from free lancers who’ve been at their desks right along. I know the ‘250 words’ rule and the ‘not the entire thing however long or short it is’ but that doesn’t seem to me to cover recipes properly, especially when the little suckers change every time they go through another pair of hands (mine, anyway)-and what about the fact that your average cookbook has several hundred of them? When is passing a recipe or several around a ‘if you like these, buy the book’ teaser, like the first chapters publishers bind and pass out at book conventions or hang on their web sites, and when is it ‘these are the best half dozen, don’t bother to buy the book’ theft?
You also can’t copyright something that’s already in the public domain, you know? Like brussels sprouts and chestnuts. And I’m not sure you can copyright brussels sprouts, chestnuts, and wine. Wine is one of those things . . . every cook on the planet who’s ever had the end of a bottle of wine she hated to throw out has put it into unlikely places and some of them work out pretty well which only encourages her. (A lot of us started by dumping wine-bottle-ends in stock. I really thought I’d arrived, in my early twenties, when I started putting red wine in gravy.) I’ve never done Marsala sauce, but I’ve certainly done sherry rice with sprouts and chestnuts.
It’s a little bit like copyrighting a retelling of a fairy tale-you can’t copyright the plot. But this discourse is soon going to stray into the sticky area where fanfic also lives, and there’s a FAQ answer on my web site explaining why I ask anyone who simply has to write fanfic about any of my work to keep it a private vice, and don’t hang it on the web.
And just by the way, does anybody else but me think Nigella looks like she’s on drugs all the time now? I don’t think being married to the Saatchi^^ has been all that good for her. ^^^
^ Only a crude, gauche person would substitute bacon for panacetta. No doubt. Sue me.
^^ Peter says: Earth hath not anything to show more frightful/ Than art the brothers Saatchi find delightful
^^^ This is a gleep. I have no idea why that entire blank line won't go away, but it won't.
*** These are the remembered horrors of my adolescence. I don’t know if they still exist or not-and I don’t want to know-and there are probably different horrors now. It’s also amazing anyone lives to grow up. Or anyway isn’t put off wine for life. I nearly was put off champagne for life by an ill-advised foray into the pink stuff. What a terrifying thought-to have missed champagne.
† I am not kidding. I wrote a letter to the company and they wrote a very friendly letter back. But they’re still putting corn syrup in their pea soup, and it tastes weird.
†† Okay, I make a lot of stuff out of BEAT THIS too, but her stuff is more the standard American comfort-food repertoire that I know and make already, and it’s more like having a conversation with a friend. “Well, I use two teaspoons of cinnamon.” “Well, I use only one, but I add a teaspoon of vanilla.” I learnt new stuff out of the Frog.